This story was co-developed by Titan127 and beta read by ShonnaRose and JhinoftheOpera.

[14-3] Still Family

Introducing themselves, it seemed, was easier said than done.

The Nosepass, released from her Poké Ball immediately afterwards, wasn't exactly present. Whenever he and Laina turned to look, she was frozen ten paces behind, her nose directed towards them. They experimented a bit by disappearing behind some rocks a distance away, where they found that the compass consistently found true north at Ciel's coordinates.

He approached her, seeing that her piles of stones trembled under the torque of her magnetic field, and circled her to test the waters. She simply pivoted without moving her legs, that red nose following his motions exactly. He stopped. She stopped. He reversed. She reversed.

"Freaky," said Laina. "But maybe she likes you?"

Ciel and Laina offered their names to the Pokémon, who answered with a stone face. All his other Pokémon made sounds, if not vocally than with their bodies, but she was completely unresponsive.

"I declare that her name's Feona." Laina puffed her cheeks and pounded a fist on her heart.

"Do we get a say in this?"

"Course not. I declared it."

With Feona in tow, their gang slunk further through the mountain, Ciel muttering to himself logistical notes about how to take care of a Nosepass while cross-referencing its entry on his Poké GEAR's dex app. He proposed himself a few theories as to what Feona was made of, and what that might warrant to care for her as appropriately as she needed. He couldn't even begin to imagine what she ate.

According to his map, they were only short ways away from a halfway marker of the mountain passage, which was supposed to be stocked with some extra canned supplies and fuel to carry them the rest of the way. Still, they could've been an hour or more out.

"Are you holding up, man?" he asked his Typhlosion.

Arden was nodding off into an abyss of frostbite and preserved remains, and no matter how much Ciel wanted to make it the extra few kilometers to the marker, it wasn't worth it. When they finally narrowed down a quiet section of the cave between two rising rock formations, they set up. Soon they had a basic encampment with insulated tents, and Ciel asked for a final flame from Arden to eat the last bundle of firewood from his backpack. The tiny blaze became the centerpoint of their pitstop.

Ciel weighed Raven's Poké Ball, wondering if releasing her would do more harm than good. She was a Pokémon attuned to cold, now properly considered Ice-type according to the ESM 6, so it might make her a little more at home. He watched with bated breath while her exhausted body materialized.

She managed to meet him with one eye, and the rest of her was trembling. But the cold seeped into her fur and stilled her, allowing him to slip the cloth sleeve over her sickle.

"I've got food here. So, uhh, if you need anything, just ask," said Ciel.

She sagged over to Arden and formed a shield of pearl fur around him. He was huddled so close to the campfire, trying to siphon as much warmth as he could, as if he was afraid his own flames would never return. His eyes were dulled with mourning.

Raven and Arden had both suffered through losing a member of their team. He wished he knew more intimately what they were grappling with, and if they blamed themselves just like him. Arden lifted his snout when Ciel cupped his chin and scratched a bit of love into his changing fur, but at once his teeth bared. He snapped.

Ciel yanked his hand back with as many fingers still attached as he could, which he prayed was all of them. He curled the fist in his lap, refusing to move away.

"I'm sorry," he said, realizing what it meant.

Laina threw herself between Trainer and Pokémon and hoped her intervention would reduce the heat, but it maintained. In fact, Arden burned hotter than he had in days, flames or not.

"Both of you, quit it! Ciel didn't do anything wrong!" she shouted.

"It's okay, Laina."

Her head snapped to his, and she looked legitimately furious at him. "Don't start. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't."

Ultimately, she was wrong on separate counts, and though she wouldn't let him debate one of them, he could teach her about the other.

"That's not what this is about." Ciel wielded courage against the truth, knowing that it wasn't his enemy but neither his friend—the brand on his Trainer Card was a constant agony. "I abandoned him again."

"Again? What do you— oh."

"His teammates are his family. And he just—" Ciel choked on his own memory. "—he lost part of that. So, what did I do? I just shut down because I didn't care."

He saw his sister wind up, her palm splayed above her head like a smiting from the gods above. She paused. "I don't know if I wanna slap you."

"It's not like I don't deserve it."

"Okay, now I definitely don't."

She tried to flex some warmth back into her fingers as she plopped beside him, mirroring the two Pokémon in a strange way. He wasn't sure if she was intentionally trying to make a point, since her explanations were all over the place at the best of times.

"I was talking with someone," she said, "and it made me start thinking about things."

Ciel resisted the urge to joke about there being a first time for everything. Drowning his problems in humor was bound to spiral, since he'd just keep putting them off and off until he overflowed with every stupid little mistake he kicked down the road.

"Lemme just say, you shouldn't have left me with your Pokémon. Bad idea. Battling sucks and I don't get it." Laina didn't seem to know the line between trying and actually helping, though he appreciated the effort regardless. "But the person I talked to said that I better help you, because you aren't like this because you don't care. You're like this because you care so freaking much."

That didn't absolve him of anything, it was just an excuse for his horrible behavior. There might be deeper scars on Arden's heart than anything Ciel's missteps carved into his body.

"That's why it hit you hard! I'm glad that when something bad happens you don't shrug it off because it means you love them." Laina's rising voice echoed off the crystal walls. Every wild Pokémon in the area might've heard them. He was a kid being scolded, his sister the elder instead of the other way around, and she hid her unsteady tone behind a pitiful little war face.

Ciel shouted back, "So what if I care? I still abandoned my Pokémon! And I still couldn't save him!"

She crossed her arms and wielded a frown like she was patting a club in her open palm. "Are you ready to talk about that yet?"

You've broken our little agreement time and time and time again. Perhaps a little refresher is in order.

"No," he whispered. He couldn't ever be.

"Whatever. I already kinda know already."

He sprung. Seizing his sister's shoulder and not realizing the strength he still had in one arm, he shook her. Hard. His nerves twisted in knots, sending signal after garbage signal to his head. "You can't say anything! Please, Laina. Just forget her. Oh no, no no no no, please, you have to—"

His grip tightened as all the possible scenarios passed through his mind. A scarlet mound of flesh and bones, a home ablaze with fire and screams. It was all so vivid in a place only he could see, and he couldn't sputter his warnings fast enough.

The sky cracked. The stars fell. The world was swallowed up in a short few moments, and he was distantly aware that he was rocking his sister so hard she was shouting at him to stop.

She threw two firm palms against his chest and nearly split his skull open on a rock. "Get a grip, you big idiot. And not on me. Who's 'her'? Mint?"

Ciel's eyes, probably spidering with bloodshot, whipped across the immediate area searching for the threat. That violet hair and those sharp, piercing eyes. No matter where he was, no matter what Region or city or route he was traveling, she was always a promise's length behind in the shadows. She made that clear. She was always watching.

Strung up with his sudden adrenaline rush, it took him more than a few moments to register the genuine confusion on his sister's face. She sat quiet, put-off but otherwise patient. He hovered his hand in front of his mouth as the puffs of his breath dwindled in frequency.

"You done?" she asked.

Shakily, he gathered himself in what could be called a sit. "Y-yeah."

"I wanna give you the positive of the doubt," she said, not realizing that she'd failed an idiom, "that you have a really good reason for not telling me whatever it is you're so freaked out about. Right?"

He couldn't move without considering every possible ramification of his actions. Only a single time, barely detectable, he tipped his head in a nod.

"You're not gonna tell, no matter what?"

He saw her face contorted in screams. Again, he nodded.

"Okay. Cool." She fought with his answer for a while. "I'm fine with that. Don't worry about it."

"What do you know?" he croaked.

"I heard you talk to Dad the other day. Sorry for evens— eaves— you know what I mean. So, I know what happened with your Pokémon."

"Hector didn't do anything! I'm the one who—"

"Hector did it for you! He did what he… he wanted to. That's what you said. And he wouldn't have done that if he didn't believe in you, so you need to believe that he did that for a good reason."

He clutched his head and tried to puncture his skull with his fingers if it might help him ignore what she was saying. Shut up. Shut up! Death wasn't something Hector had any right to choose, not for his Trainer's sake. He didn't have to die. Ciel could have protected himself better, or not chased that woman at all. If only he'd just shut up and skipped town, Hector would still be safe.

Hector would still be here.

Laina proved that she wouldn't sit and take his breakdowns and kept on beating him. "I used to think Training was just what people did to make Pokémon fight and solve their stupid arguments for them. Actually, nevermind, I still do. But you seem to think you're some big family that loves and trusts each other, so you oughta start practicing the crap you preach."

She wormed her way right into his personal space and her gentle but firm hands dragged his wrist from his scalp. Her soft expression terrified him.

"You said you gave Arden a chance to leave. You trusted him to choose." The pained memory overburdened his already pulsing brain. "What would you do if he did?"

Across the fire, his Pokémon warmed themselves together. Raven watched them through a single open eye, and Arden's were wide with judgment. Laina wasn't the only one expecting an answer.

"I…" He swallowed back down the wrong answer.

They watched him shatter. A leader, a fake. Faithless and formless. He tried so hard not to cry, but he failed spectacularly, knowing how obvious his betrayal was to the ones that needed him to trust their choices. "I'm a terrible person."

"No! Ciel, you saved a whole plane of people. You saved those mine guys in Oreburgh. You saved me from that dude with the knife. You're supposed to be—" Her face curled. "You are the best person I've ever met."

She threw herself around him, simultaneously squeezing the life out of him and minding his broken arm. She was warm enough to melt the frost crawling up his neck from his heart.

"They're still here because they think so too. And they know that you're still their family even if you don't know how to do a hard thing right now."

Glacially, painfully, he cranked his living arm up and placed his hand on her soft, red hair. Even at the cold peak of a mountain, he felt alive in her arms, and a waterfall rained from his face.

A light flickered, not from the fire but beside it. Ciel raised his head to see Arden leaning over with his limbs locked tight and a ghost burning on his collar. His teeth were still clenched through a tiny split in his muzzle. An opinion, not an attack. Raven, torn between her ward and her partner for a moment, broke from her post beside Arden and bared her sickle—in Ciel's defense.

Throughout the worst pangs of her phantom sickness, Ciel had let her know she wasn't alone. Perhaps that painted her actions, or perhaps her trust in him ran deeper than he could have even imagined. No matter the why, Raven took her position as his knight. An armor and shield for someone she believed in.

Arden accepted that.

He kneeled and begrudgingly wrapped paws around both Ciel and his sister, while Raven filled the gap on the opposite side. Ciel was enveloped by the warmth of his family.

"I love you so much," he said, to Laina, to his Pokémon, to everyone who didn't know who he really was.

This chapter ended up being one of the heaviest in the story. I actually wasn't expecting it! When initially writing this, I had it in my head that any resolution to Hector's death would be either solved earlier or pushed down the road to a later point, but this seemed a really great point to engage with it because Ciel, Laina, and their Pokemon were in a really intimate space where they were accountable to only themselves.

Next chapter is one I've been looking forward to for a long time, if only because it justifies a character tag this story has had for a year and a half. 14-4 is Heir on the Mountain. See you someday!